Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Last week on their Internet Explorer blog, Microsoft celebrated the first anniversary of Internet Explorer 7's release by putting out a post touting IE 7's rapid uptake and tightened security.

Predictably, when this hit the blogwaves some experts jumped in to question a few rather dubious claims in the post. But the real news happened a few screens down in the comments section, where a deluge of scorn and frustration was heaped on the Internet Explorer team by the general public - the regular people who use and build the Web.

Microsoft is widely regarded as being pretty good at advertising and marketing it's products, but they've occasionally been conspicuously unable to perceive irony in their messages. Microsoft proclaimed they were fighting for their "Freedom to Innovate" in response to the U.S. Department of Justice's anti-trust action a few years back... action launched of course because Microsoft's monopolistic practices were squishing innovation . But it's one thing to ignore what your customers are asking for, then brazenly lead your marketing with, "We Heard You". It's quite another to bring that kind of thinking over to your corporate blog where unhappy customers are free to call you out.

Why were users upset? Well, consider that in the time since IE 7 was released...

Firefox went 2.0, and released beta versions of 3.0. Scores of extensions - a la carte features Firefox users add in to customize their browsing experience - have been improved or newly released this year.

 

Safari released 3.0 Beta, including a new version for Windows that feels lighter, faster and smarter than IE 7.

 

The strangely overlooked Flock released a 1.0 version. While IE 7 finally adds the same level of RSS support other browsers have had for years, Flock gets social media right, and is a glimpse of what IE might look like three versions from now.

 

Opera has committed support for next-generation technologies like HTML 5, SVG and future versions of JavaScript, while IE is still struggling to fix buggy, incomplete support for decade-old standards.

 

...And for the people who either want to or have to use IE, watching Microsoft let a year go by with no new improvements highlights lessons un-learned - not something to celebrate.

A special variety of animosity came from Web designers and developers who can't ignore IE because of it's broad market share, but are growing weary making Web pages for 2008 that have to work in browsers from 2001 (IE 6), and are frustrated with lack of progress in IE 7. Microsoft realizes it needs these people - what could MS have been thinking when they provided the time, place and catalyst to turn them into an angry mob? They might as well have handed out the pitchforks and torches!

You can learn from your customers with your corporate blog. When it's time for a mea culpa, your corporate blog might not be a bad place to put it out there (hint, hint). Your corporate blog can be a very powerful weapon in your communications arsenal, but as with any weapon, it's never a good idea to point it at your own foot.

 

5. Security is for wusses. Only dumb people ever fall for those phishing tricks, anyway, right? Sure, viruses, spambots and adware slow your computer down a little, but all that "security" stuff in Internet Explorer 7 slows things down too. Where's the upside for you?

4. RSS is a fad that will soon pass. You don't know what RSS is, and you don't care to learn. Internet Explorer 7 comes with RSS built in, and there's no way to remove this "feature". If there's one thing you absolutely can't stand, it's unwanted software you can't uninstall!

3. New features are too confusing. Tabbed browsing? How could that possibly be useful to anyone? Why would you want multiple tabs when you can have multiple windows?

2. Don't mess with success. If IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera, with all their better features, better rendering and better security are so great, how come over 50% of us still use IE6? 

1. Nostalgia. IE6 hails from 2001, a pre-9/11 world where things just made more sense. The US Justice Dept. had just given Microsoft a get-out-of-antitrust-court-free card. Windows XP was released that September - no one had ever heard of Mac OS X or iPod. President Bush's approval rating was all the way up in the 40's. N'Sync were still together. Ah, 2001... Good times.

Coming soon: You can take my '73 Ford Pinto when you pry it from my cold dead hands...